Daring Caring & Sharing! The Video

As you watch this video, please consider sharing it with at least 10 of your family, friends & neighbors — asking them to do the same!You are participating in a growing grassroots-to-global team to achieve the goal of worldwide awareness for the critical issue of Maternal Health.

Why A 'Daring Caring & Sharing' Video?

Based upon our previous global collaboration to create the WHO / NIGH “Nurses & Midwives” video, we knew that this kind of online outreach has so much potential. If a picture is worth a thousand words, what might 50 or 100 pictures do? Especially if we have superb musicians to share their artistry in our soundtracks, we can bring world-class talent to our joint efforts!

In 2010, we had a wonderful opportunity to work with our good friend and colleague, Maria Knapik — the renown Polish Canadian Soprano — who is also keen to share her talent in support of mothers and children who are at risk.

Maria Knapik at the Lincoln Center Kaplan Penthouse in New York City. Photo Source: NIGH Archives

Teaming up with Maria and our colleagues at CoNGO — the Congress of Non-Governmental Organizations in Consultative Relationship with the UN — we co-hosted a special 2010 International Year of the Nurse Concert at the Lincoln Center in New York City on the eve of the September 2010 UN Millennium Development Goals Summit at UN Headquarters. This Concert — named "Raise Your Voice” — focused on the themes of Maternal and Child Health and also featured our colleagues Maestro Michel Brousseau and the young award-winning Pianist, Shun-Yang Lee, who, as a student at the Bard Conservatory of Music, also worked as a volunteer at the CoNGO office in NYC.

Sharing the Music — Building A Global Outreach

At this Concert, we invited a videographer to record the performances and capture some related interviews beside the skyline view of the Lincoln Center Kaplan Penthouse. Afterwards — during the last months of 2010 and throughout our newest planning session across 2011 — we wanted to do something more with this footage. We wanted to use it to further develop NIGH's ability to involve many more people — to widen an outreach of concern and commitment for child and maternal health.

In 2011 — as we watched the spectacular use of social media to increase support for the 'Arab Spring' demonstrations in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen and Libya — we wondered how we might use these same social media tools to increase support for global maternal health awareness. If they could gather so much energy for their causes in the Middle East, might we also — with a growing team of nurses around the world — develop something that might also 'go viral' across cyberspace? To heighten awareness and participation for the plight of so many mothers suffering and dying around the world?''

Could we create a simple online outreach tool to share some of the best music of our concert? To involve many more people to share and become inspired — as we have been — by this cause and this musical way of reaching out, wider still?

This video — launching our ”Daring Caring Sharing” Campaign— is one of our first answers to these questions.

About the Video

This video’s format is simple — an evocative music score, compelling still photos representing faces and places from around the world, a straight-forward story-line and, finally, a brief 'ask’ of you to share with 'some of your friends.'

The soundtrack features Maria’s haunting rendition of “Lullaby for A Dying Child,” from the Polish opera ‘Halka’ by Stanislaw Moiuskzko. Sung in her native language, this aria was chosen for its universal pathos of a mother mourning her loss, never to see her child again.

We envision this video reaching out across the world! Really going viral!!! You can participate as one of the 'stakeholders' in this outreach!

We welcome you to do so! If you can think of other people and organizations who would love to also participate, please let them know. THANKS!

Encore!

Click here to see a related performance by our friend and colleague, award-winning pianist Shun-Yang Lee.